


where the only languages were violence and lies

by appleheart



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Self-Mutilation, Silent Protagonist, and the justifying of the same
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corvo bit out his own tongue rather than let them torture him into a false confession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the only languages were violence and lies

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this partway through my first Dishonored playthrough, trying to develop the sort of person who would remain true and clean-handed throughout the ordeal ahead. It's always someone else trying to make him into an assassin--he is the Lord Protector.

Corvo spent six months in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, where the only languages were violence and lies. He refused to speak in either tongue. 

He bit his own off, so that they couldn’t torture a confession out of him for the audiographs to record and replay all over the city. He would not make it easy. He would not consent to absolve her real killers of their guilt. Nor would he take the risk that Emily, wherever she may be, would hear her only friend say he murdered her mother. The grave of the Empress was fresh raw dirt in his mind and in the minds of her people, and he would not help to cover it over. 

If he never spoke again, at least his last words were true ones. 

In prison, rats nipped at his heels when he let them dangle off the edge of the crates that werehis bed. The prison guards spoke of the plague, the death toll, the blockade. The smoke that poured in through the window grate stank as much of human flesh as of whale oil. 

To stay sane, or as close as he could approximate, he flung his mind out beyond the dank walls and backwards in time. Day after day, in the raw ache within his being, he told himself the truth. He started at the beginning: the day he first saw the Empress. Then, the day he met her. The day he entered into service. As his jailors shouted lies into his ears, Corvo insisted, silently, on the small and simple truths. He put each memory in order, etching them into his mind, in all the detail he could muster.

He avoided the ugly memories, the recollection of violent times. It was too easy to lose track of when and where he was, if he was roused from a memory of blood into another night in the interrogation room. 

While they starved him, beat him, cursed him, defamed his name, carving away piece by piece of the Lord Protector, Corvo recreated himself: a mausoleum of memory, a sepulcher of unspoken truth. 


End file.
